Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Mehdi, I..
Many millimeter-wave mixers and frequency multipliers today still employ a whisker contacted Schottky diode as the nonlinear device.
The gradual depletion of the Earth's stratospheric ozone and the regular appearance of deep ozone 'hole' over the polar regions has dramatic ramifications for our planet
The authors report on the direct detection capabilities of resonant tunneling diodes in the 10-100 GHz range. An open circuit voltage sensitivity of 1750 mV/mW (in Ka-band) was measured. This is higher than the sensitivity of comparatively based commercially available solid-state detectors. The detector properties are a strong function of diode bias and the measured tangential signal sensitivity (-32 dBm at Ka-band with 1-MHz bandwidth) and the dynamic range (25 dB) of the diode are smaller compared to other solid-state detectors.
Stability criteria for resonant tunneling diodes are investigated. Details of how extrinsic elements, such as series inductance and parallel capacitance, affect the stability are presented. A GaAs/AlAs/InGaAs/AlAs/GaAs double-barrier diode is investigated, showing the effect of different modes of low-frequency oscillation and the extrinsic circuit required for stabilization. The effect of device stabilization on high-frequency power generation is described. The main conclusions of the paper are: (1) stable resonant tunneling diode operation is difficult to obtain, and (2) the circuit and device conditions required for stable operation greatly reduce the amount of power that can be produced by these devices.
A lattice-matched InGaAs/InAlAs resonant tunnelling diode is studied as a video detector in the millimeter-wave range. Tangential signal sensitivity and video resistance measurements are made as a function of bias and frequency. A tangential signal sensitivity of -37 dBm (1 MHz amplifier bandwidth) with a corresponding video resistance of 350 ohms at 40 GHz has been measured. These results appear to be the first millimeter-wave tangential signal sensitivity and video resistance results for a resonant tunnelling diode.
There are two points that should be noted. First, in the thermal resistance calculations it is assumed that the device is operating at 773 K while the results of the room temperature simulations are used. This was done because there is not enough information to correctly predict the material parameters at 773 K. Since, in general, device performance degrades with increasing temperature, the cw results are perhaps a bit optimistic. Second, the electric field in these structures gets extremely high and there might be some possibility of tunneling. This was not incorporated into the simulation. Again, this could result in different device operating conditions.
Numerical simulations were performed to investigate the typical power-generating capabilities of SiC IMPATT diodes. Using available material parameters, SiC double-drift IMPATT diodes were simulated at 10, 35, 60, and 94 GHz, and the operating characteristics of these devices were compared to those of Si and GaAs devices. Compared to the Si and GaAs IMPATT performances in the pulsed mode, the SiC IMPATT performance was found to be far superior. The performance of SiC devices in the CW mode was also superior to that of GaAs devices, especially at lower frequencies. At a high frequency (94 GHz), the performance of the SiC device was found to be comparable to that of Si devices.